I love this also. It is interesting that geneticist Jef Boeke and Johns Hopkins colleague Srinivasan Chandrasegaran used undergrad students to do the work:

From the NPR article:

Quote

At first, Boeke tried to buy some of the DNA strands they wanted to use from a commercial outfit. But the first small batch took nearly a year to arrive."I realized I would be dead long before the project could ever be completed," he says. "So it suddenly hit me that there were all these students on the undergraduate campus who would be dying for a great research opportunity."